What I'm up to this week (March 12, 2017)
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Making a schedule, as many have noted, is in fact useful for productivity. It also helps with saying what I'll be up to for the week. So far I've got:
- Continuing progress with Fortran: I'm going to be posting my review for the first third of the book I'm reading on the subject. It's about 600 pages of text, so breaking it up into 200-page intervals seems reasonable.
- Working through my library: There are a number of books I've ordered over the years that I've never gotten around to reading. My next on the list is one called "Probably approximately correct" about evolution as a computational process. I'm already about a quarter of the way through, so hopefully I'll have a review for that soon as well.
- Why gerrymandering is hard: So I started, briefly, my gerrymandering project with a short overview of the topic. There's a few additional videos and resources I've found that help to explain what makes the problem hard from a political and technical perspective, and how any proposed districting has to meet multiple criteria to be acceptable.
I also posted my review of the "Getting Started with Julia" book, and I think I'll hold off on reviewing any more books in that series. Not because of the quality, but because Julia is just changing too fast as a language to make it a wise purchase. I was just reading some of the early release notes for 0.6, and there are some changes to features I recognize, such as "is" being deprecated in favor of. "===". Nothing huge, but things I'd like to see settled before buying something in print.
On a more random note, the library I used for the post image is Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. I've been lucky enough to visit myself, and in additional to being a stunning library, it contains such seminal works as Newton's Principia. There are very few things I feel a need to collect, but one day when I make my millions I'll get my own set of those books. Yes, she shall be mine...